Creative musings in bright colors

Posts tagged ‘Whats Up Nails’

This mani is almost cheating – I did this while on vacation so I didn’t take any non-iphone photos! Ergo the photos are easier to edit (for whatever reason my iPhone sunlight photos need a lot less color correction than my indoor photo camera, even if the details are better on that one). ANYWAY. Purple glittery goodness!

There isn’t much to say here. I used a fantastically sparkly polish and just stamped over it. The stamping plate was not quite thick enough to not be able to see the glitter through the black polish but I actually quite like it!

Hand-painted floral gradient time…happy Spring! It certainly feels like it here, we had a truly impressive lightening storm followed by monsoon-level rain. I spent a large portion of my evening just staring out the window in a dark room!

Anyway, it is also new polish time! This is three coats of Little Oysters by Ethereal Lacquer. This was a limited time buy (from one of the custom groups I am a part of) and I love it! I am actually wearing it (again) as I write this. The polish itself is a bit thick, however it is very opaque and I probably could have gotten away with two coats! It is a greyed-out pastel lilac with copious pink shimmer that shifts to yellow-gold at sharp angles. It looks grey, purple, pink, and sometimes yellow.

I decided I wanted to replicate some of the cool designs I had seen online with this particular stamp, but using purple rather than a multi-color gradient. In retrospect it would have been much easier to actually do a gradient, rather than hand-painting each layer of petals directly on the stamper head! But the end result is pretty cool.

Super simple and super fast. This is one of the quasi-Christmas themed manicures I actually did over the holiday break. I more or less only took reds and greens with me, with a few stamping plates. I decided to do a tone-on-tone manicure using the wonderful opacity of every A England polish, and one of my favorite (if underused) dark green holos, Ski Lodge.

This whole manicure took less than an hour, and it was mostly waiting for Ski Lodge to dry before I could stamp. The design ended up being somewhat subtle, but since the nails were a vibrant shade of forest green, they were themselves far from subtle!

Another pink over teal mani! But this one is ALL SHINY. I kinda wish I had used a creme base honestly, but somehow the silver is metallic, the pink is metallic, and the teal has pink metallic shimmer. This was really quite shiny!

I’m pretty sure this is double stamped with the same gradient, which is why some of the lines aren’t exactly these same thickness? Or maybe the stamp just looks like that. I am far too lazy to check!

Flowers! I feel like it has been a while since I posted something floral. Of course, it is the beginning of March so I figured it would be warm-ish out. I was wrong. It snowed yesterday and is likely to snow again on Sunday. Oh well! Flowers anyway :-p

I wanted to make a flowers-fanning-out-in-purple appearance, but the base I used has copious yellow/pink shimmer (I forgot to post the swatch before the nail art, oops!) so it kinda looks yellow-to-purple. I like it anyway but it has a very different flavor!

This mani is halfway between winter and spring: winter colors but with flowers and a butterfly! Given how cold (and snowy) it continues to be, I thought that was fitting.

This is a new-to-me polish, and I love it. For some reason I am super into shimmers right now, and this is subtle, elegant, and loaded with shimmer! What you see here is three thin coats of Quixotic Polish – It Rubbed Off From Friction. This polish is one of my only purchases from Hella Handmade Creations (I usually stick to Polish Pickup). The polish is is a beautiful dark grey-mauve swimming with pink shimmer, which also has a scattering of holo glitter. That said, while I love the color of the polish, it was a little thick and hard to work with.

I then made some stamping decals/advanced stamping (aka coloring the stamp in while it is on the stamper) using silver and purple. The color combo could have been a bit better, but it wasn’t terrible. I rather wish I had used black not silver! Or maybe simply white.

I don’t know where I was going with this mani, or why it makes me think of Pink Floyd, but here we are! Not another neon brick in the wall. Of course, in this particular scenario the bricks are truly pink and the grout is teal.

This mani was a bit of a mess. I started with a teal base, and then stamped a pink gradient over it. However, the pink did not come out as brightly as I wanted (in retrospect I should have used white first) so I stamped the same gradient again to brighten the color. Which worked…but since I used a different part of the stamp and frequently a different orientation on each nail, getting the same gradient was really difficult! I then decided it wasn’t pink enough so I added some Magician free-handed over the pink. So now there is also glitter.

In the end I wish I had just used striping tape. Generally that would take longer, but with how much time I spent on these I doubt it! I also messed up my thumb, I decided to add bright pink dots for no apparent reason. So you don’t get to see much of my poor weird-looking thumb.

Today is also a sad day, because my husband and I finally put in an offer for a (wonderful) house, and someone out-competed us (buy paying in cash, which is remarkable). I am sad! It had a perfect little nail art room and everything.

Dragons scales using Dragon! Because I had to. This also ended up rather chrome-y because I went for a silver metallic base. I kinda like it! The end effect a was a bit like nail foils.

This week is going to be a random mishmash of nail art that doesn’t fit well with anything else. At this point (in real time) I am working towards Valentine’s nail art because I know that I won’t get any edited if I wait for February! So these have nothing to do with really, anything, but they were shiny 🙂

Sorry that the posts this week have been late/only a few photos, I’ve been sick! My husband it a pediatrician which means the kiddos give him lots of bugs. This time they gave him a respiratory virus and he had the courtesy to pass it on to me first time I’ve been sent home early from the hospital!

Anyway, on to nail art! This design was loosely inspired by @gabbysnailart. I love the colors but I personally wanted more glitter. Of course, the glitter is a LOT harder to remove than creme polish, but it is so sparkly! I don’t know what I thought I was doing stamping with Rosewater and then trying to color over the stamp, but here we are!

So this mani came out better than expected! I wanted a copperish-green and I almost missed entirely! I started of with a coat of Dragon, which is of course totally opaque in a single coat…and then decided it was too dark! So I topped it with a thin coat of a different green and then STAMPED with Dragon (and some gold). Voila!

I did have to scour a bunch of plates for actual designs though! And with the combo of green and reddish-gold I think it totally works for a quasi-thanksgiving manicure 😀

Luckily, I have part of tomorrow off, so I can at least join my husband and some of our residency friends for dinner, although I am on and overnight call on Friday into Saturday, so I have to hope that whatever awesome nail polish sales happen Friday will be ongoing until Sunday! I also need to apologize for some of the atrocious spelling and grammar at the end of Monday’s post, I should not write blog posts while exhausted. Oops! Hope you enjoyed!

I need to preface all of this with the fact that i don’t like this mani. my initial idea was to stamp in white over the shimmery grey base but I thought that would be too boring….in retrospect i definitely wish i had gone that route! this color combo is a bit drab.

I bought this color by KBShimer off of one of the monthly sale groups and I am honestly disappointed! The polish is a bit thick and despite that this is 3 coats and I could still see nail line. I usually trust KBShimmer, and I am aware that they have been doing a visible nail line thing for the last release or so (which is why I haven’t bought any of their polishes in a year other than this) but pooh! I am not happy. I’ll have a post with an actual polish review hopefully sometime soon. But the polish is a bit of a flop and the nail art is ALSO a bit of a flop.

Although I don’t think the photos came out that well, I LOVED wearing this mani! The dark olive green with copper and stamped with copper…and just ugh. It was so shimmery!

I don’t have much else to say about this mani really? It has double stamping, which I remain proud of, and I absolutely love Nerida Singer when I can talk myself into wearing this polish. I still own too many olive green polishes and I refuse to part with any of them!

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed! Friday’s post is a bit less exciting (I don’t like the mani, but I feel compelled to post my failures so others do not repeat them!) so I wanted something pretty in advance!

Is this really pastiche? Not so much. A lot of my nail art apes that of other artists that I’ve seen and liked…this was sort of a general “I like things that are somewhat pastel and look like watercolor and flowers” and I tried to make it happen!

It turns out, of course, that I also like things that glitter. The end result of this mani was actually pretty fun, but I just kept adding more things! Lines and more lines and dots…In the end I wish I had used a lighter silver holo base for my accent nail, but I love the pink shine to Rosewater!

How about some silver triangles on a multichrome glitter base? Don’t mind if I do!

I don’t really know where this manicure came from, just that I wanted to play with Aurora and felt like using a funky triangle stamp. I do love funky geometric stamps! Lets be honest, a lot of stamps are things I could do freehand if I just had enough time. But perfect swirls and perfect geometric lines I could not do without hours! Which is probably why most of my favorite stamps are either straight lines or swirly bits.

That’s it for today! But happy Friday, and I hope you enjoyed the multichrome shininess of Aurora as much as I did! It almost doesn’t matter in this age of a million multichromes, but I had Aurora long before multichrome toppers were much of a thing :-p yes I am a hipster nail polish owner.

See, no more magnets! Instead you get a multichrome topper over not black? I don’t know what I was thinking but here we go!

I wanted to try Aurora over a dark teal base. And then I decided that bubbles were appropriate? My nails under this are a DISASTER. I painted these just after I finished moving apartments, and my ring finger tore to the quick (and is heavily patched), AND my middle finger somehow shattered, but I was able to file the surface to somewhat smooth and apply 4 coats of base coat in a desperate attempt to hold it together, and my pointer folded down the middle. I won’t even mention my poor short thumb nail…I lost both corners on subsequent days! Suffice to say my nails are a disaster and this is one of the last right-handed manis you guys will be seeing for a while!

Despite all the devastation, I think the mani looks surprisingly cool? The teal base blunted a bit of the color shift in Aurora but you can still see both the green and certainly the purple shift. Also, I like this stamp!

You guys, I know I keep saying this, but I am soooo tired. I got two hours of sleep last night and had a lunch meeting today so I couldn’t sleep as I had planned! So this post is going to be short.

For some reason this mani just reminds me of toothpaste? Like the white + black + bright teal makes me think of toothpaste tubes and paste coming out of them. i don’t know. The art was inspired by the actual Whats Up Nails website, although I should have picked a slightly less-white base and a dimmer color! I wanted a neon, and I got a neon. I’m going to have to repeat this in a way that doesn’t make it look like an advertisement!

I don’t know what I was thinking with this. I wanted to use my pale pink swatch test nails to make something….and it got out of hand. This would actually have been a really cool mani if I just stuck to one of the paler pinks as my base! As it is with the weird background dotted gradient…nope.

So I started by making a dotted gradient from lightest to darkest color, interspersing the creme polishes with the shimmers. That looked ok. Then I stamped with a neon teal, which still looked ok. Then I added black. I just wish my nail tips weren’t so much darker! I love the pink/teal/black idea. Oh well.

In other news, this is my first Whats Up Nails stamping plate, and I love it!! It is wonderfully etched and I wish I had done this mani better service. It is one of the only plates I own where I can really see myself using every single damn image. I am impressed! Despite how awful these look, you will be seeing a lot more of these designs. Anyway, happy Friday, and I promise next weeks manis are better!